Digital Research Confidential [Book Reviews]

Interest from academics in the humanities and social sciences in studying the cultural dimensions of computing can be traced back at least as far as the early 1980s. As personal computers became increasingly common in homes, offices, schools, and universities, scholars like Jay David Bolter, Lucy Suchmann, and Sherry Turkle began the work of adapting the research methodologies of their respective disciplines to study computing in these new contexts. Personal computing devices and the myriad of cultural activities we juggle through them have since become more and more complicated; however, at the same time user-friendly approaches to design encourage us to take this complexity for granted. Indeed, as Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig note in their introduction to Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online, there is now often little institutional reward for writing about how the broad integration of computing affects academic research about culture and behavior. In this respect, their collection serves as an effective argument for the value of sustaining in-depth conversations on the effects that constantly changing technological conditions have on research methods. It is also an engaging introduction to the wide range of research in these fields being conducted digitally. Not to be confused with the “digital humanities” — a field largely devoted to studying and preserving pre-twentieth century texts due to the copyright’s influence over digitization efforts — the “digital media studies” represented in Hargittai and Sandvig’s collection focuses on contemporary and often digitally created cultural activities. This interdisciplinary research area involves scholars from a variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, literature and language, writing studies, history, anthropology, sociology, communications, information science, and computer science.